Sasikumar was never fond of the darkness inside cinema theatres. Instead of joining his friends for the first show after college, he strolled through the art gallery and walked through the book-lined aisles in the Public Library. Often, in the vast compound amongst all the books and trees, there were just two people left when the wall clock struck nine; Sasikumar and the watchman, and their broken conversations before heading to the bus stop. Some evenings, he spent time with Padmarajan, Arvind and Narendra Prasad at the university lawn, eating vada wrapped in oily newspapers and discussing the world within and around. Stories spun their way out.
Years rolled past. Sasikumar now stands on the doorway with flowing white beard that brushes his green kurta, as one attempts to absorb some of his paintings. They are terse. Sublime faces melt into each other. Emotions emerge from between what looks like geometrical figures at the first glimpse. Colours sync and reveal pangs that can be identified with, if you have minutes to spare on each square on the wall.
Sasikumar’s talks are laced with laughter and dusty memories. He recalls how one day he gazed for hours at a Ravi Varma painting of a woman playing the sitar. “The fingers on the sitar looked so real that I almost felt the strings creating a rhythm. He was known as a calender painter. I believe he is much more. It was he who gave god a human face, adorned them with sarees and jewels and expressions. Until then, deities were rocks,” says Sasikumar, who also founded the Society for Protection of Cultural Heritage.
A student of his switches on the laptop, as Sasikumar talks about his painting ‘Revenge’, which has a woman with nails trenched down her legs, termites crawling upwards. She is seated on a chair with a broken leg and she is falling. Falling apart, yet waiting. “This painting, like any other, was a coincidence. The tree from outside the window cast its shadow on the canvas and my thoughts went astray, giving way to this painting,” he explains.
In the side room at Alliance Francaise, stacked on a wall are some paintings that have not been put on display. He hastily skims through and explains them, in a line or two. A painting from his Tsunami series encompasses ghastly white spirits with innocent baby faces merging with the air while the crows occupy the soil.
A blank canvas lies amidst the stack. “I always have a white canvas with me. I never know when I might want to paint.” Saying this, he rushes back to a memory. During an exhibition slated to be held at Mumbai, Sasikumar forgot to carry a Ganapati painting, without which he felt incomplete. So he stayed up that night in his hotel room, as the rain hammered down. The next morning, for the exhibition, he displayed a painting of a naughty Ganapati blocking the rain with a Trishul.
He believes in God and in destiny. Leaned against the wall is a painting in green of a Ganapati; a fleeting ray of sunlight flashes across the green.
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